Anthony Davis blurs the lines between jazz, opera, world music, the avant-garde and other styles with unique skill and daring.

He has been doing so since even before his first opera, the Grammy-nominated “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” premiered at City Opera in New York in 1986. That was about 15 years after he was invited to become the keyboardist in the Grateful Dead.

“It’s all music to me,” said Davis, who is now completing his ninth opera and performs here May 2 at Conrad Prebys Concert Hall with contrabass great — and fellow UC San Diego music professor — Mark Dresser. Collaborators since the 1970s, when they met while Davis a student at Yale, the two will perform composed and improvised solo pieces and duets.

“I bring all my experiences as an improviser into composing an opera,” Davis noted. “I look at it as unified expression. One of the reasons I was initially interested in opera was to bring improvising in it. That’s one of the reasons I’ve had Mark play in many of my operas, which embrace our improvisational traditions.”

Davis lives in University City with his wife, noted opera singer Cynthia Aaronson-Davis. Their son, Jonah, 20, is a junior at UC Berkeley and is regarded as a Major League Baseball prospect.

The other operas the elder Davis has composed — working with an array of librettists who put words to his music — are no less ambitious or provocative than “X.”

They include the science-fiction opus “Under the Double Moon”; the Patty Hearst kidnapping-inspired “Tania”; the slaves-in-revolt-fueled “Amistad”; the American Indian-influenced “Wakonda’s Dream”; the battle-of-the-sexes morality tale “Lilith”; and the Shakespeare-meets-early-onset-Alzheimer’s-disease-themed “Lear on the 2nd Floor.”

Davis’ acclaimed operas have been produced by Spoleto USA Festival, the Vienna Opera in Austria, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha and other companies in the United States. Several of his operas have been released as albums. In 2008, he received the National Opera Association’s “Lift Every Voice” Legacy Award, in honor of his groundbreaking work.

Curiously, though, the San Diego Opera has never contacted him about a collaboration, even though Davis has lived and worked here since 1998.

“I’ve tried to reach out to them, but I haven’t had any luck with the San Diego Opera,” he said. “I have worked with Los Angeles Opera; I did workshops with them for ‘Dream of the Spider’ — an opera I was developing about the Cuban Revolution — and also with the Long Beach Opera.”

Photo by Eduardo Contreras/San Diego Union-Tribune

The subjects of Anthony Davis' operas range from Malcolm X and Patty Hearst to South Carolina church assassin Dylann Roof.

The subjects of Anthony Davis' operas range from Malcolm X and Patty Hearst to South Carolina church assassin Dylann Roof. (Photo by Eduardo Contreras/San Diego Union-Tribune)

Giving audiences a visceral experience

Davis’ most recent opera, “Five,” premiered in 2016 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. It will be produced in a revised version next year by the Long Beach Opera.

Now retitled “Central Park Five,” it is based on the Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were falsely accused in 1989 — and later convicted — of raping a young white woman jogger in New York’s Central Park.

DNA testing eventually cleared them of all charges. But soon after they were arrested, New York real estate magnate Donald Trump spent $85,000 calling for the return of the death penalty in full-page ads in New York City’s four largest daily newspapers.

The presence of Trump, who is one of the featured characters in “Five,” is indirectly felt — but not referred to — in Davis’ upcoming opera, “Darkest Light in the Heart.” Set to premiere in 2020 at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., “Darkest Light” is based on the aftermath of the fatal 2015 shooting of nine parishioners in a Charleston church by white supremacist Dylann Roof.

“ ‘Darkest Light’ starts right after the shootings and Steven Fechter has written a very powerful libretto,” said Davis, whose music for the opera will showcase a 15-piece chamber ensemble, a chorus, and up to seven featured singers.

“I think operas work on multiple levels and certainly a visceral level is one that I’m very concerned with. I want the audience to have an emotional experience that involves identifying with the characters and putting yourself in their place. So I really like to think about these characters, particularly in ‘Darkest Light,’ where it’s very clear that it’s about those characters’ emotional journey.”

Davis will be traveling to Charleston to meet with relatives of the shooting victims and explain how “Darkest Light” addresses the church massacre.

“The main character in it is JoAnne, a fictionalized character, whose mother is killed in the church. She’s goes through all the stages — grief, anger, rage and more — to arrive at that point where she can forgive Dylann Roof,” Davis explained.

“But before JoAnne rises to forgiveness, there are all kinds of things she goes through, including fantasizing about killing Dylann Roof. So there are things we have to explain, even though we’re imagining that situation. As an artist you have to be able to do that, in order to create a viable experience. And that’s always a balancing act — and a very interesting dynamic — when you’re dealing with living people who went through the experience and are protective.

“You want them to understand what you’re trying to do and that you’re not there to exploit their situation. You’re there to tell their story, make a point and have a deep understanding of what happened and the heroic aspects of how they were able to respond and move on.”

As with Davis’ “Central Park Five” opera before it, the social and political underpinnings of “Darkest Light in the Heart” are unmistakable. His opera is based on a recent, all-too-visceral tragedy, which is juxtaposed with the spirit of human resilience and the nobility of forgiveness.

“It’s interesting,” he said, “because it takes you through: ‘How does the black community respond to this perpetual violence, this assault, that goes from slavery to now with white nationalists? How do you respond to that?’

“So ‘Darkest Hour’ tries to deal with that in its libretto and — in a very real way — wrestles with that. The person JoAnne is based on came to a point of forgiveness. But would others forgive? Would I forgive? I’m not sure I would. What I’m thinking, in a way, is: ‘How do you move forward? What creates that ability to move forward? And, also, where does that hate come from?’

“Those are real things that go to the core of that problem about America and the miracle of how African-Americans have been able to survive and move forward from these kind of events.”

Davis composes his operas seated at his piano. He subsequently plays through the whole piece, then begins to improvise to get a sense of the musical language best suited to the work at hand. Then he further contemplates the libretto, while playing piano, and explores different ideas and possibilities.

File photo

Anthony Davis (at left) is shown with his genre-leaping band, Episteme, in a newspaper clipping from the 1980s.,

Anthony Davis (at left) is shown with his genre-leaping band, Episteme, in a newspaper clipping from the 1980s., (File photo)

‘Out of the jazz tradition’

“My ability to improvise really helps me to try things out and get a sense of the musical landscape and the overall shape,” said Davis, who graduated from Yale in 1975 and has won numerous honors, including a 2006 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

“Then, I work mostly on a Kurzweil synthesizer and headphones at night. When I start composing, I work with my computer and start looking at the words and setting them to music. I improvise some more and also think about where the spaces are, where I need music between scenes, spaces that are not sung and are just instrumental.”

Improvising has always come easy to Davis, who took to the piano and music as a kid and never looked back.

His godfather is the late pianist Billy Taylor, who was one of America’s pre-eminent jazz educators and champions. While enrolled at Yale. Davis played with such top bebop saxophonists as Jimmy Heath and San Diego’s Charles McPherson.

Soon he was collaborating with such cutting-edge visionaries as Sam Rivers, George Lewis, Oliver Lake, James Newton and David Murray. His seventh solo album, 1981’s acclaimed “Episteme,” combined sophisticated jazz-fueled improvisations with minimalism, intricate African rhythmic structures and — in particular — gamelan music from Indonesia.

“I definitely came out of the jazz tradition,” said Davis, who laments his efforts to join the band of Charles Mingus never reached fruition.

“And I did a duo concert with Billy Taylor, here in San Diego at the Old Globe, many years ago. But, mostly, I’ve been associated with the avant-garde, so I haven’t done a lot of traditional stuff.”

Davis is well aware his operas are challenging and provocative. His music can be beautiful and lyrical one moment, then dense, knotty and full of shifting meters the next. The serious, real-life issues his operas address ups the ante even more, but doing so is both a creative and cultural imperative for him.

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Davis said. “You feel like you have to do this, for many reasons. It’s necessary for developing your art. But, more than that, it’s about trying to voice something to the world and the community, and about trying to have an understanding of complex political and social issues that affect us today. And that, for me — which is all about: ‘What is your purpose in life?’ — is why I do what I do.

“Finding the artistic vehicle to wrestle with these things, which affect so many people, has been really rewarding and essential to my purpose as a person.”